A report from 2005 on Piracy. http://www.pcworld.com/article/id,120885-page,1/article.html

To summarize this article, about 1/3 of all software sold in the world is pirated. The worst offenders are Vietnam, Ukraine, China, and Zimbabwe, who all have more than 90% of software illegally. The lowest piracy amounts are the US at 21%, New Zealand at 23%, and the UK at 27%. So good for the US. A large percentage of pirated software is operating systems (Microsoft claims 20%-25% of Windows copies are pirated), so actual video game piracy isn't that bad. Especially in the US, although worldwide it is growing due to the growing market in countries like China, Vietnam, and Korea.

As a side note, this makes guigr's statement completely impossible. Only 33% of software worldwide is pirated, and it would have to be nearly 80% for his statement to have any validity, or at least nearly 80% in the US, where the majority of PC game sales come from. 

I agree with you that this statistic seems unlikely. However, I do feel compelled to point out that some percentage of people who torrent then distribute to their friends with either a direct file transfer or using burned disks. I obviously have no idea what the numbers are for this method but it could be significant.

 I don't know how many (if any at all) pirates you know, however, i know 2.  I have known these guys since my first day of college back in fall of 2000.  Both own a ps2 and a wii.  one has a ds the other a psp.  Now let this be clear, these guys are very hard core gamers, they game every day from the minute they get home from work to the minute they go to bed.

Want to venture a guess how many games they bought in the last 7.5 years?  2 - World of warcraft and World of Warcraft the Burning Crusade.

Now I'm not going to say that the video game industry lost money based off the number of games they downloaded cause these guys don't make enough money to buy that many games.  I will guarantee you that there is a very real lost in money due to the fact they never paid for a single ps2 or wii game.

I bitch and whine to them about piracy every time we play together and I've heard every excuse and justification for piracy in the book.  Bottom line is piracy is theft and hurts the industry.

Best case scenario - if there was no piracy video game profits would be higher and eventually lead to lower prices. (movies cost a hell of a lot more to make and sell for a hell of a lot less simply because the amount sold is drastically higher)

Worst case scenario - piracy increases to level where game companies become so unprofitable games will only be produced for the segment of the market that doesn't pirate. (i.e. - and entire market of wii fit, brain age, nintendogs)

./hate pirates. selfish and shortsighted ftl

People come on, don't pirate the games. If there was less piracy we'd see larger sales of PC games causing more developers to come to here.

Piracy makes sony and cod4 developers very sad.

Well I wasn't exactly talking out my arse either =P I have XP and Vista on my PC also, and 4GB ram. Every game I have tested (and I have tested a lot) usually runs 2-5 FPS slower in Vista if both are being run in DX9. If you run a game in DX10 that difference jumps closer to 5-10fps. When I do these tests I try to use built in demo tools so that the game is doing the exact same thing in all cases and measuring the exact same situations, when possible I also use in-game FPS counters in addition to FRAPS. I have yet to find a game that has equal or worse performance in XP when compared to its performance in Vista.

And yes I realize most probably aren't as anal about it as I am.

Here are some benchmarks from other websites:

This last one is just another 3D performance test software...ugly...

To be fair tho, out of the hoards of games they tested there was the extremely rare instance where Vista took the lead...I don't own this game btw.

It appears to depend on the game, card, and features you are trying to use. But the results they got and I got are beyond conslusive that Vista is in fact a performance hit for gamers. It might not bother some people, but its not any less true.

My original point was still that they mark you down for not having Vista btw. I think we should at least be able to agree that XP is at least as good as Vista.

Pirating a game is stealing it. You're downloading a game that costs money, and by not paying for it, it is legally theft. That's the bottom line, there's really no way around it.

You may be easily able to download the game and bypass its security, that doesn't make it legal though. And you're still playing a game for free, whereas others pay for it. You may just be "trying out the game," but that's a luxury not legally allowed anywhere.

You can't watch a pirated movie and say, "I was just seeing if I would want to go to the theater and pay for this movie," because it's likely you won't, and you can't unsee what you've watched. You can't un-play a game, you've played it, and most pirates don't go out and buy the game they downloaded.

True enough, and while morally wrong there are reasons why all the studies done on piracy show it's a non factor on the industry as a whole. (Though granted most of these have been done with music since the music industry is bigger.)

There are few "Try before you buy" people, though they do exist. What piracy does do that tends to make it revenue nuetral on an industy as a whole are these things.

1) Create viable markets where they are otherwise non-viable. For example, people places like Brazil and other south american countries can't really afford to buy a console and then buy a bunch of games. Game piracy in this case spurs console sales that otherwise wouldn't happen, at the cost of nothing since these people are too poor to afford both system and games in the first place. Ipods are another example, plenty of people wouldn't buy Ipods if they used a quick piracy safeguard to just allow songs downloaded from Itunes to be played. Apple of course decided against this even when anti-piracy groups asked them to.

2) Get more people more hooked in and interested. For example recent studies on music piracy have shown that the more people download music the more they buy CDs. Which when you think about it is a weird correlation until you think about it and realize that the more someone is using a certain media form, the more interested they are in general. Piracy like this is going to penalize the more popular games in favor of lesser known or less popular games. Some people may find completly new genres

3) People who pirate products are more likely to use them or legacy products when they move up to being honest human beings. Take a look at Microsofts buisness stance which is "Don't pirate, but if you do pirate us." They see each pirate also as a potential buyer later on. Sometimes ease of piracy can actually decide what products are succesfully chosen.

Piracy is one of those things that can be a postive force believe it or not, so long as most people are against it... though that revolves on personal responsibility.

Either way i think you lose something if you pirate games. As "stealing" stuff like that has always made it hollow in my opinion.

I don't need a sports car, but it might be handy every now and then...


Since I wasn't going to buy it, then it isn't wrong to just take one

The effects of pirating games and software aren't 100% for the worse, no.

But in general, I think we'd be a lot better off without piracy.

And I can understand piracy in countries where the prices are ridiculous...but most pirates I talk to are in the US, Europe, Korea, etc, and there's really no personal excuse to pirate if you live in such a country.